It what may be the first popular cyber uprising in history, and the first uprising in the West in the 21st century, the group "Anonymous" launched a cyber (war, protest, revolution) on major companies that have withheld funds from Wikileaks. Learn more
With the advent of popular blogging, twitters, Facebook, etc. the Internet has become the Sixth Estate. With investigative journalism in decline, major journals (the Fifth Estate), have begun relying on the Sixth Estate for information. Without a doubt the most powerful and threatening to Western nation-states has been Wikileaks.
Across the globe nation-states have a history of guarding themselves against the power of the Fifth Estate. Dictatorships routinely shut down and imprison dissident journalists and attempt to control information by launching official news (propaganda) sites. In the West information has been traditionally corralled, as Chomsky informed us, by drawing a close connection between the government, commercial advertising interests and the media. Printing risky articles could endanger future advertising dollars as well as access to official sources.
Government control of the media became particularly pernicious during the early stages of the Iraq War, where journalists were embedded with troops and reporting was limited to either video game-like images or pro-war reporting (with demonstrations against the war receiving minimal coverage). Moreover, the USA engaged in several acts of aggression against Al Jazeera, bombing their stations in both Baghdad (here) and Kabul (here). Moreover, Cheney, Rice and others attempted to pressure the government of Qatar to reign in Al Jazeera (here) With this history in mind, many people question whether or not the accusations against Julian Assange are real or have been fabricated as a way of shutting down Wikileaks? (Learn more)
Following Assange's arrest, a number of companies moved to cut off Wikileaks funding as servers withdrew in the hope of unplugging the site. The internationally coordinated attack against Assange and Wikileaks makes one wonder if there isn't a government(s) orchestrated conspiracy?
What is interesting is the way Wikileaks has survived through mirror sites (here)and the degree of support around the world from both hackers and street protesters (here).
If Bush/Cheney had little problems intimidating the Fifth Estate, it will not be as easy for Obama to play rough with the Sixth Estate as much of his candidacy was built on transparency and mobilizing supporters using new information technologies (here). It may be that the Sixth Estate will rock the nation-state. The question for the future will be: Will historians site the Wikileaks versus Western governments together with the Tehran uprisings as examples of the first new global struggle over information, power diffusion and transparency?
Click on the following links for key articles:
Anonymous - here
Hactivists - here
No comments:
Post a Comment